ART on view FIG. 15 (above): Ceremonial vessel. Kongo peoples; Kongo Kingdom, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Republic of the Congo, or Angola. 16th–17th century (inventoried 1659). Calabash, raffi a, wood. H: 52 cm. Kunst- und Wunderkammer des Christoph Weickmann, Ulmer Museum, Ulm, Germany (AV D. 74). 98 in Europe in their original context. Instead, they were so easily and fully assimilated that any former Kongo associations were essentially forgotten. When these minimally documented works left the region as early as the sixteenth century, they were brand new at that time and have been preserved ever since in pristine condition. Although Kongo artists were also responsible for contemporaneous religious artifacts that were in use, no examples of these are known to have been collected. Instead, recognition of the spiritual potency of those devotional works made them the periodic targets of iconoclastic campaigns of destruction.11 Kongo Textiles as Material Wealth and Technical Virtuosity The Portuguese sea captain and explorer Duarte Pacheco Pereira (c. 1460–1533) declared Kongo luxury cloths “so beautiful that those made in Italy do not surpass them in workmanship.”12 Accounts of the earliest exchanges between Mbanza Kongo and Lisbon underscore the inclusion of such textiles among the gifts relayed by Diogo Cão from the Manikongo João I to King João II of Portugal.13 These are not among the few surviving exemplars preserved in the West that represent the uppermost qualitative tier of fi ber arts produced in the region. In Loango an established hierarchy of locally produced textiles was used to measure wealth and power. The fi nest of these were the prerogative of the upper echelon of the court and were displayed or stored as treasured possessions. European trading partners such as the Dutch carefully informed themselves about evolving local consumption, which included an appetite for novel varieties of imported textiles. Ultimately, the fl ooding of regional markets with textiles from abroad led to the demise of the celebrated labor-intensive indigenous weaving traditions.14 According to seventeenth-century accounts, a single prestige textile of exceptional quality demanded fi fteen to sixteen days of sustained effort by a highly experienced weaver.15 Fine raffi a fi bers were woven in rectangular or square units on a vertical single-heddle loom. The back face was plain weave and the display side embellished with geometric elements integrated into the fabric ground as supplementary weft fl oats. Once a completed panel was removed from the loom, the weaver fi nished it by hand, cutting and rubbing select weft fi bers. While the weft fl oats refl ect light, the denser areas of cut and rubbed tufts absorb it, affording a rich surface of alternating textures and tonalities. This technical approach is distinct from that of neighboring traditions in which surface design is embroidered into a plain-weave ground.16 sages of design (fi g. 10). Fiber artists embedded parallel elements into the woven ground and then introduced nuanced texture and chromatic values through cutting away surface fi bers. Using adzes and fi ne knives, carvers also inscribed geometric patterns that unfold in horizontal and spiraling bands on ivory elephant tusks (fi gs. 5, 13, 14). Evidence of the longstanding adherence to this visual vernacular is apparent through locally excavated seventh-century ceramics featuring the same incised motifs (fi g. 12). The collection histories of the early Kongo prestige arts assembled in this exhibition refl ect the high esteem in which this region of Central Africa was originally held in the West. The earliest of these is an oliphant, inventoried in 1553, that may have entered the Medici collections in Florence as a token of appreciation from the King of Kongo to Pope Leo X (1513–1521), the former Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, for appointing the African leader’s son, Henrique, as a bishop (fi g. 5). A signifi cant number of the rest appear in the inventories of the most celebrated Kunstkammers, the so-called “cabinets of curiosities” comprised of marvels gathered from across the world, including those of Württemberg in Stuttgart, Duke Frederick III in Holstein-Gottorp, Frederick III of Denmark in Copenhagen, and that of Prague Castle where the collection of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II was housed (fi g. 9).10 Early Kongo artifacts were an integral part of the cosmopolitan inquiry of learned individuals and men of science such as Ludovico Settala in Milan; Athanasius Kircher, S. J., in Rome; Sir Hans Sloane in London; and Sir Robert Sibbald in Edinburgh. They were also prominent among the exotic treasures assembled by the wealthy entrepreneur Christoph Weickmann of Ulm (fi g. 15). Despite their initial valorization as comparable to European creations, centuries later the Kongo works in the most prestigious collections of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries were either completely forgotten or demoted to less prestigious company. Many Kunstkammers underwent a reclassifi cation according to geographic criteria. By the nineteenth century non-European items were relegated to complete obscurity or designated as more appropriate to the newly established “ethnographic” institutions created across Europe in response to colonialism. Surprisingly, these Kongo works that arrived the earliest in the West are the least familiar. While admired on aesthetic grounds in elite cultural repositories, where they became part of a cosmopolitan mix of artifacts from across the globe, it is apparent there was no real interest
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